Accompishment Unlocked: Cinnamon Pull-apart Bread!

Over the weekend I woke up with a serious desire for cinnamon rolls. Saturday morning is made for cinnamon rolls and cleaning the house. Bonus for me: I get up earlier than the rest of the house, especially on Saturday, so nobody is playing Skyrim, and I get a little quiet time to myself and the dog. I can even play video games, if I want, but I almost never do. Usually, what I do is pick up the house and make some breakfast.

I didn’t take any pictures of the dough-in-progress. I have been really enjoying using the bread machine to do the sticky/mixy/hands-on part of bread making. A tiny part of me feels bad about it, but really, it’s kind of the best. There’s a reason I have the bread machine, after all – I like homemade bread, and I like that the machine makes it easy and efficient. I’ll try to be better about taking pictures of that part of the process.

Aaaaanyway… my quiet toodling around Saturday morning was interrupted right at the point when I had rolled out the dough and covered it in a lake of melted butter and cinnamon-sugar. And honey.

Me: I’m making cinnamon rolls!
Joe: I stumbled upon this thing the other day that was like a loaf of cinnamon bread, but all in layers.
Me: THAT! I’m going to make that!

So instead of rolling that bad boy into a tube and making rolls, I used the bench knife to cut it into quarters, then cut each quarter into 8 or 10 rectangular pieces. I didn’t take a picture of that, because fail. Then I crossed my fingers and hoped that I wasn’t going to cover my counter in butter-honey-cinnamon-sugar-goo, and started stacking the rectangles.

I stacked them pretty haphazardly, doing my best to keep them approximately upright. At no point in this process did I refer to an actual recipe; I’m sure there’s a better technique for accomplishing pull-apart bread, but this one did just fine.

This is literally immediately after it came out of the pan:

Yes, that’s a big chunk of the end missing, because people were eating it faster than I could photograph it. Except for the part where I wanted a picture of it, that’s not a problem.

Mmm, pretty, pretty cinnamon bread.

I’ll definitely be making this again. The layers mean that there’s no specific portion size, unlike a cinnamon roll. I may have eaten an unreasonable amount of this, but it’s impossible to know. I ate some layers, that’s all! Also, my utter seat-of-the-pants no-plan approach didn’t do it a bit of harm. I could’ve made some icing, but the lack of it was not a problem. And, thanks to the bread machine, the active time on this was probably 10 minutes, total. Not bad for a lazy Saturday morning.